Kevin Jagernauth

If Playing It Cool is meant to be an ironic interpretation of what happens to these characters, the film isn't sharp, smart or insightful enough about how actual humans interact to pull it off.

The Impossible strikes an insincere tone, one that doesn't let the obviously powerful moments stand on their own, but instead follows the beautiful Hollywood stars to safety, while the real story is left on the ground.

Felony isn't a federal case of a bad film, but it's certainly a serious misdemeanor, one whose crime is running away from the challenge the story sets up, to settle on something cheap and conventional.

Aiming for a trifecta of small kids, their older sisters and parents in the audience, Fun Size fails them all in a movie that is neither a trick nor a treat.

An audience’s mileage for Hedda will depend on how much they enjoy watching what is little more than a parlour game between the pampered upper classes.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

My Blind Brother is mirthless, though Kroll and Slate have a delightfully easy charm that occasionally rises above the tedium.

Eventually settles into a dull routine much like the dissatisfied characters of the film, which will make for an easily dissatisfied audience.

Didactic yet generic, The Promise endeavors to educate about a period of recent history that is still unacknowledged by the Turkish government, but curiously manages to be anonymous in form nonetheless.

Sadly, the sequel isn't even so bad as to be memorable. Instead, it's vaporous, not even possessing the qualities indicating that anyone involved cared about any detail of the film.

Carelessly crass, and yet enthusiastically performed, the film does at least offer the curious spectacle of witnessing strings of jokes energetically thud in a movie that's not worth the commute to your nearest multiplex.

This film requires so many leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief that you might develop acrophobia.

Broken simply can't get it together on any level, delivering a tedious drama, that for all the characters and over-emoting, doesn't have much to say.

While the idea is original, it's also ridiculous, and the story is not close to clever enough to put it into any kind of context that is compelling, interesting or believable.

Brad’s Status rarely affords its titular character an opportunity to have a real conversation with anyone else his own age, so the movie becomes a monologue from someone you quickly realize you don’t really want to get to know anyway.

The film’s half-hearted politics — which do make a statement, regardless of intent — are perhaps less egregious than a movie that’s simply going through the motions for the bulk of its running time.

For the most part, the most shocking thing about Swerve is how utterly straightforward it is.

Mr. Nobody is simply a failure.

The filmmakers’ inability or unwillingness to actually engage with the discourse it builds Echo Boomers around leaves the film feeling both artificial and hysterical.

The film’s attempted cathartic payoff is inauthentic and unearned, and it’s a shame considering that Gyllenhaal once again gives a committed turn.

Overstuffed yet trite and empty, Fort McCoy attempts to mix heavy drama, slapstick comedy and romance all in the wrappings of a coming of age tale set in the summer of 1944, but flounders on all fronts, resulting in a picture that offers a rather naive and simplistic view of the murky territory between good and evil.

Can't Stand Losing You lacks that sense of the three dimensional when it comes to documenting the band, presenting a sanitized, bird's eye view of their history

Perhaps the array of characters read better on the page, but it all feels slight in execution, particularly when half of the running time is spent on Tommy’s past and what unfolded between himself and Shelley. Combine all that with a particularly lackluster sense of urgency and pacing, and you have film that offers few reasons for investment.

It would be too easy to say The Magnificent Seven isn’t magnificent. It’s definitely not, but the film has an even more egregious quality: it’s uninspired. There’s no risk, no real attempts to subvert expectations, and no desire to truly give the audience something, if not entirely new, then at least surprising.

With no unique viewpoint on the story of its own, it’s perplexing why Papillon went in front of cameras at all.

Lords Of Chaos is more interested in the spectacle than the substance behind the true story, and that kind of phoniness likely wouldn’t even get the film or Åkerlund invited into The Black Circle.

Tedious and painfully miscalculated, Dirty Grandpa is never as filthy or funny as it thinks it is.

Almost coming off like an academic blueprint of what a serial killer movie should look like, rather than anything with a distinct voice or authorial hand, "No One Lives" shocks by virtue of being completely uninteresting.